Robotics Projects

I spent a bit over ten years in and around Sydney University's robotics labs. I did a combined B.E./B.Sc., with my engineering major in Mechatronics, and my honours thesis implementing path planning and obstacle avoidance for a pair of autonomous ground vehicles (AGVs).

I then joined the Australian Centre for Field Robotics as a Ph.D. candidate, spending three and a half years on a variety of mainly AGV projects. This culminated in a thesis that solved the Time-Optimal Active Decision Making problem - how best to optimise a dynamic system when the computational time to perform the optimisation must also be minimised.

Most recently, I was employed in the Rio Tinto Centre for Mine Automation as a research fellow and systems engineer. I designed and implemented the communications protocols, language, and software infrastructure to allow different vehicles to co-operate across the entire mine environment. This work is critical to Rio Tinto's "Mine of the Future" programme, and is currently being standardised and ruggedised for production use by Rio Tinto's internal team. It will save them several haul trucks worth of cash per year through efficiency gains and avoiding vendor lock-in.

In the research side of this role, I developed a collection of non-holonomic planning algorithms that efficiently pre-process the complex manoeuvres for different vehicle types, allowing for real-time deployment in the field. Better motion control leads to lower maintenance and fuel costs, improves production quality, and will lead to billion dollar improvements in mine efficiency.